David Krauss:                     00:00                     There’s so many opportunities along that first day of them occupying to educate them about things that could cause you the host massive nightmares later on if you don’t tell them about it.

Julian Sage:                         00:11                     This is episode number 31 of Short Term Rental Success Stories Podcast.

Julian Sage:                         00:15                     Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed? Go to cohostit.com for more information.

Julian Sage:                         00:21                     Welcome back to Short Term Rental Success Stories. I’m your host, Julian Sage. This is a show where I talk to hosts about their journeys in starting and growing their short term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information that’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business. Like any exceptional hosts, we all strive for five star reviews, so please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy because it really helps support the show. If you haven’t done so already, go on over to our Facebook group, the Host Nation to connect with the community.

Julian Sage:                         00:51                     In this episode, I had the special honor of speaking with David Krauss. David is the co-founder of NoiseAware, an innovative noise monitoring service for short term and vacation rental managers. A little bit about David is that after a party happened at one of his properties, he was forced to sell his property and lost over $30,000 which almost ruined his short term rental business. It was at that point that David knew that he had to start something that would help future hosts not get into the same situation by preventing noise. So he met his co-founder, Andrew Scholz and they started to build this like “smoke detector for noise” with the goal of saving short term rental property owners and managers from the same experience that David had to endure. This is a really great episode doing a deep dive into what noise aware is, how it can help you, and why it is a tool for hosts.

Julian Sage:                         01:41                     Now, if you follow us on Vacation Rental Machine, Jon and I talk a lot about NoiseAware because it is such a unique product that does help you to be able to better protect your property. I know Jon is a big fan boy of David so he was pretty jealous that I got to speak with him. But no, really, really good episode I highly recommend. We also talk about David’s other little passion project that he is really diving into and that is Rent Responsibly. So it’s actually funny this episode we talk about half of NoiseAware and how that can benefit hosts. The other half we’re talking about Rent Responsibly and Rent Responsibly is an organization that David founded, which is all about trying to convert the negative bias and change that perception of short term rentals. So he works very actively in the legal space trying to work with local counties to educate them on the benefits of Airbnb and short term rentals and the tools that you can use to be able to prevent these parties in hopes of being able to allow hosts to be able to short term rent. So David is a professional party squasher and this is a great episode that just talks all about that. So you don’t want to miss it. With all that being said onto this week’s conversation.

Julian Sage:                         02:59                     Hey, welcome back, host nation to another episode of short term mental success stories. In this episode I have the special special honor of bringing on David Krauss. He is the cofounder of NoisAware and a nonprofit rent responsibly. Excuse the noise, David is a very busy on the road a lot of times so he just had a moment to sit down with us in a beautiful bench. If you are on YouTube get to get the beautiful view with the trees. But David, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and explaining what inspired you to create NoiseAware and how you got started into that.

David Krauss:                     03:33                     Sure. First, please do excuse the noise. I was just joking that entrepreneurs are always on the go, but I’m literally walking between things in the middle of downtown Boston in the summer. It’s my favorite place in the world. So please excuse. But thank you so much for having me. Honestly, this is a wonderful opportunity to talk a little bit about NoiseAware but mostly not help the folks out there that are listening on their journey and, and I’m sure there are many people who are, you know, in different stages. So we’ll try and be more broad. But you know, the story of noise aware is probably the most organic startup story a you’ll find. And that’s because I am a short term rental manager and certainly was at the time when we started noise aware and had the exact problem that we’re solving.

David Krauss:                     04:20                     Very quickly, I was managing a couple of units in Dallas. Somebody threw a massive party, kind of that nightmare scenario. You see a lot of those articles on the news about so and so’s house, you know, destroyed. Oh, because of a party, you know, waking up on Monday morning, finding out about this party that lapsed from Friday all the way through Saturday night. I was like, man, I was two miles away. How could I have prevented that? Went online. There was no such product that would have been able to notify me with relevant information at a timely basis and simultaneously protecting privacy. So we saw that void or vacuum in the world, my co founder and I decided to fill it ultimately yes as just a product of tool for me so I could sleep at night with peace of mind. And when we realized that I was not the only one who had that same concern, we brought the solution we built for me into the marketplace and it’s been a roller coaster but a fun one.

Julian Sage:                         05:19                     You know, I just think that that’s really interesting because you’re, you’re a short term rental operator that created a product specifically for short term renters. I mean this seems like it’s a pretty like man, I’m like this is a really good idea. Has nobody else had done this? Like out there like some type of noise monitoring device that notifies you when levels get too high?

David Krauss:                     05:39                     So great question. The funny part is that a lot of investors ask us that question like how did nobody do this yet? So I think the key thing to understand and with the the time and yeah, the moment in time that we’re all in is that there are 50, a hundred great small, maybe some, maybe some even large businesses that have not even yet been established or are conjured up. And we are all as owners and managers probably struggling with something that could be solved by one of your listeners. So it is the most ripe time for ideas where people like, Oh, why didn’t anybody think of that? You know, the underpinning reason is we’re in like inning one or two a or probably two or three of the short term rental story the most, I’ve not heard of anybody talking about 10 years from now, but we need to start thinking about 10 years from now.

David Krauss:                     06:35                     And that’s an approach that noise aware has taken. A lot of our partnerships, we just recently announced a massive partnership with booking.com. A lot of those conversations we have with those platforms are about 10 years from now. And I think we’re all just starting to pick our heads up and realize that short term rentals, I have a lot of statistics that I can throw out there and I’ll, I’ll try and spruce or sprinkle some of them in. But short term rentals have skyrocketed into popularity and common understanding of accommodation options, no longer alternative accommodations is just an accommodation option. What is preferred when you have over three people or it’s an over three nights day. So once you have that understanding the needs of the traveler, the needs of the proprietor are completely different than they were 10 years ago. So what we’re building now is going to help create the sustainable future that we’ll all be a part of

Julian Sage:                         07:30                     So in 2012 you had your first guests. 2014, you started going more full time into a hosting. In 2015, you met your, your, your other co founder to start noise aware. Did you have like any type of entrepreneurial background before that besides just like hosting? Like I mean that that’s a pretty big endeavor to take on. You know, just starting up a company.

David Krauss:                     07:52                     Yeah, a great question. And I love, I love when you know people entrepreneur, certainly not somebody who’s quote made it by any means yet. We’re still, we’re still grinding as hard as well, we always will. But when you know Elon Musk or somebody ends up there, he’s like, you know, at five years old I started a business and stuff like most of that’s bullshit, right? And it’s just like a myth that people tell. So I was like, you know, my story is like maybe a lemonade stand growing up and whatever. That’s not what happened. Ultimately, once I got into the workforce, I realized I hated it. And the main reason is there’s, you know, it’s like [inaudible] do this, do that, get your report in on time. And I just said like, I got all these ideas, like what if I have a new way to do the report?

David Krauss:                     08:38                     They’re like, no, no, no, no. Don’t just do it the way we told you to. I couldn’t stand that. So I will say that it wasn’t until I realize what I don’t like. Then I realized I was an entrepreneur, I guess, you know, not somewhat an analog or kind of secondary parallel is in my twenties I’m 35 now, but in my twenties I loved to party. You know, I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I would organize these charity events where instead of just inviting friends to a bar that had a cover and you know, blah blah blah, I would work with the bar and one of them that I actually worked at is quite easy. I would just say, Hey, I’m going to have my birthday party here instead of making it free for all my friends, charge them anyways and then let’s take the money and donate it. We partnered with the local hospital here that did not have a choice of games, budgets. We bought toys and games for that hospital. I mean those are the kind of needles that you’d thread in life. And once I realized that, Hey entrepreneurism, so almost like a similar game, right? How do you provide something, get money, apply it to provide a better service that virtuous flywheel starts. I mean, I was kinda doing that before. I just didn’t know it was called entrepreneurs’ until I get somebody started paying me.

Julian Sage:                         09:53                     No, I think that that’s really cool and I want it to highlight that you know, that you’re not just a company, you know, just not just noise aware, not just David Krauss. There’s a story behind it. You’re, you’re an operator. You know, you were a party guy but now you’re a party squasher which is kinda funny. But if for the people that don’t know what noise aware is, could you give a rundown of like how does it work, you know, how does it kind of function? Is it like very intrusive or is it passive?

David Krauss:                     10:20                     So I think, you know, we fall under the IOT banner most of the time. When you think IOT, you think like that’s shelf at home Depot or something of like smart light bulbs and things? We are not, we’re more of a B2B IOT concepts. We’re not on the shelf at home Depot because short term rental folks don’t go to home Depot to buy, you know, really anything if they can avoid it. I’m sure they buy it online and all that. So in terms of what noise, where is as an identity? Fundamentally we are a service that requires hardware and our customers are generally small businesses. Once you disabuse yourself with the idea that we’re, you know, a smart light bulb type company, [inaudible] fundamentally changes our the way we deliver service. So we always answer the phone. You won’t see, they call us on Sunday.

David Krauss:                     11:08                     Like, no, I wouldn’t do it. Just the test because somebody will answer and they probably aren’t sitting in the office waiting. But if you did call us Sunday and you needed us, almost invariably there’s somebody there. And that’s because we are the customers we seek to serve. Meaning I knew that most smart home companies don’t want to answer phones. So as a fundamental, you know, service provider, I said we’re going to be available. So, I know that was a long way of saying, not really that much, but here’s what noise where is, we are a couple as a service. We’re either peace of mind as a service. We’re privacy, safety, noise monitoring as a service. We’re a smart noise monitoring as a service, all these sorts of things. And the way the system works is we have hardware component, which is our purpose built designed by us sensor.

David Krauss:                     11:59                     And then we have a software component, which is our dashboard and all of the integrations in different elements that get you the alert when you need it. And the, the rest of the information would be the noise data graph. And I’ll just walk somebody almost easier to think of it then like how you get started. So if you were to go online and buy annoys, wear a sensor. Let’s say you have a single family home with a patio in the back, you’re going to get an indoor sensor and an outdoor sensor. The indoor sensor lists at 199, outdoor sensor at 99. And we’ll gonna send you those two sensors with some onboarding information. Download an app, you take the sensor indoor sensor and you plug it into a common area. Let’s just say the living room. It takes up the top outlet and then you screw it into this screw plate.

David Krauss:                     12:50                     So prevent tampering or people pulling it out. And then you teach the wifi name and password to the sensor, which takes all of you know, three or four seconds and then it’s going to boot up and connect to your wifi. And then all of a sudden on your app or your computer that you know your PC dashboard, you will start to see the noise levels populate on a graph. And on that graph you have on the Y axis noise risk score. So we are not a simple decimal measuring device. We have created a really sophisticated algorithm. It is taking intermittent samples or a readings, not samples, but readings of how loud is it right now. And let’s say it’s our scale is one to a hundred let’s say it’s a 70 and it’s like holding 72 would be loud but it’s you know your, your graph would start to draw a line at 70 but what happens is noise goes up and down and so when you’re on the software side, you’re going to set a threshold, right?

David Krauss:                     13:51                     So nobody cares about the 99.5% of the time that there’s not a noise issue. It’s one out of 200 nights booked, you have a noise issue and that’s what our data has proven time and time again. So that one out of 200 nights when the noise is going to go up and stay up and remain above the level that you’ve said is, is acceptable, you’re going to get an alert. So this is now how the product functions. You’re getting an alert, which is either SMS, email, push notification or if we’re integrated with your property software system, you can build a, an automation around that. And once you have that critical insight, you can then address the issue directly with your guests as appropriate. You said that your, your partner uses noise aware in his units. I imagine that he’s had at least one noise alert over time.

David Krauss:                     14:42                     I imagine he was able to remedy the situation remotely by sending the guest a friendly text message or whatever he needed to do phone call and then what we see is within 15 minutes the noise levels will will then go back down to an acceptable level and you realize the guests rent places not to cause trouble. They’re just oftentimes, like I said, over three people is the average. It just gets loud or people turn on Bluetooth speakers or whatever it is and if you have quiet hours, the best way to manage noise is proactively in an hospitable way. We enabled people to do that. The last thing I’ll say is our service is $99 a year for the property or $10 a month and if you are a large manager, just call us pricing and enterprise pricing. We also have additional services, our response center, which is an overnight service that will take your alerts and then respond to your guests with your prescriptive messages. We just have you tell us all that and we make sure to do it the way you want us to do so you don’t even have to touch the thing. But yeah, I mean it’s fun. We’ve been building this for four years now. Oh, we’ve done I think over 400,000 reservations. We’re getting pretty big man

Julian Sage:                         15:58                     Now. I guess one of the first things that I would maybe see as being a concern is, you know, a lot of hosts have their accounts shut down on Airbnb because someone reports them for maybe like having some type of device recording or a camera. Airbnb is very fickle and they just kind of say like, Hey, if anybody reports anything, it gets shut down. And then they apologize afterwards. So have there been problems with people that have like a noise monitoring device. And then when someone sends them a message like, Hey, we noticed that it’s getting a little bit too noisy. And they’re saying, well, how did you know? Like, has that ever been a problem?

David Krauss:                     16:33                     Great question. That kind of fundamentally comes down to, you know, educating the marketplace, educating the traveler. And that we’ve been doing that for four years and we, we do have a good relationship with Airbnb. They all have a pretty clear their terminology, surveillance policy. Yeah. But it’s just a bunch of lawyers who wrote rules but they’re important rules. So when you have noise where in the home you do, you are required on Airbnb to disclose it in your connected devices listening. But that’s actually a really good opportunity to begin the value that noise aware can bring to your, your listening. By that I mean it’s an opportunity to say because you can write it out and this is what I have in mind is in order to remain compliant with city rules or building rules, we have noise monitoring tool called noise where it’s a hundred percent privacy safe.

David Krauss:                     17:27                     If it does get to, I will contact you just to ensure that you don’t get yourself into trouble. Like that sort of messaging goes a really long way. And actually if you are in noise where a customer, we have a bunch of different ways to say that. So we take all the guesswork out of it. But yes, disclosure is huge. It’s important. You should do it. Technically if you read legally is, if you have an iPhone that’s not even in service and it’s in a drawer and it’s in your home that you’re renting out, you technically have to disclose that there is an iPhone that’s not even like, it’s crazy how some of these rules have been made. But functionally, definitely a disclosure with noise. Where is the important thing also, that’s one, one opportunity to disclose it. The other is in your house rules onsite.

David Krauss:                     18:17                     So what happens when people check into a rental and I’m like, are other stuff down? Look for the wifi password and then you know, it’s a group of people, they’ll just start, you know, their vacation or their visit or whatever. And there’s so many opportunities along that first, you know, day of them occupying to educate them about things that could cause you the host. Massive nightmares later on if you don’t tell them about it. So, Hey, I just want to let you know that the neighbors are very sensitive to noise. We have a noise monitoring system, it’s called noise aware. If we contact you, it’s only because it was too loud. I’m sure there won’t be an issue but this is part of our service. We have to do it cause the building, you know has strict noise rules. That sort of language was a long, long way.

David Krauss:                     19:01                     And frankly we, what we’ve started to see is guests actually appreciate this as an outcome because hospitality is the name of the game, right? So if you have positive touch points with your guests along the way, you’re almost guaranteeing five star reviews. But this is just one of them the many times where if you approach it the right way, people say, well thank you! I, you know, I didn’t realize that. And people do get louder than they think they are and in different environments that causes problems that they don’t expect and don’t want to have. Fines are up to $500 a thousand dollars you should be telling your guests that that’s what the fines are and you’re going to help them avoid them.

Julian Sage:                         19:42                     Now what about for like big houses? If you have a big house, maybe a single noise aware, just like in a specific location, maybe like the people recognize that that is a device. Maybe it’s recorded, they don’t know what it is, so they try to relocate somewhere else. Do you have to have multiple devices throughout the house to be able to get that full picture or can you just have one device?

David Krauss:                     20:04                     Great question. And there’s kind of two parts of that and that’s generally speaking like how do you deal with larger homes? And then two is like what if a guest is actually like hell bent on throwing a party or like wants to be loud and doesn’t want to be, I mean, first of all, that is a guest that you’re probably gonna have an issue with one way or another. Those are the people who leave the place trash who kind of just misuse the home. So ultimately noise aware prevents misuse of the home because it shows what your, like how you’ve structured your operation and we just see better outcomes. I know this because I’ve hosted over a 5,500 guests and you just, you know, when these things are gonna go wrong to that point noise where it should help you either prevent that guests from checking in ever because they’ll see that you care and you know, this isn’t a party house.

David Krauss:                     20:54                     So that’s why I have this technology. Or if they do begin to, you know, yeah. Hey just saying throw a party. Cause like I can listen to music by myself pretty loud and it’s not a party but it’s just sometimes it’s the wrong time place or time of night. So just saying like if you’re likely to cause an issue, NoiseAware is going to help you correct or contact the guest at that point. Yeah. And then you don’t, you don’t see a lot of it happening over and over again. Put that to the side. The other side is large homes. So large homes are tricky because there’s a lot more variability than multifamily. But we do have an outdoor sensor. I, I mentioned in the previous scenario, if you bought Noyes where for your single family home on the patio, the other sensor you would get is an outdoor sensor. It’s weatherproof ruggedized. It communicates with the indoor sensor over a sub gigahertz network. So it can go about 50 to a hundred feet away from the indoor sensor, but it’s for porches, patios, hot tub areas are a big deal, roof decks, that sort of thing. And so a combination of an indoor sensor and appropriately placed outdoor sensors you can cover virtually any home. No,

Julian Sage:                         22:04                     You know with, with booking.com taking you guys on, I mean that is a really good partnership. Booking booking.com is, is that tremendous, it really growing platform. And I think that kind of stands the point that you guys are not just providing, you know, just like a gimmick or something. I don’t know if you want to maybe dispel some of the myths that maybe you’ve heard that about noise where maybe not being a legit product or that it doesn’t really monitor good noise. I dunno if you kind of want to talk about that.

David Krauss:                     22:31                     Yeah, I mean ultimately, you know, I think our customers speed way more authoritatively about what we can do for them than I possibly could. I mean, I dunno if you know hair club for men, like the guy who is the president that I’m not only, I’m the president, I’m also a client. He has his like full head of hair. So to me I’m like you know, being a co founder or it’s like I know it works. The only reason we started into a company is cause it started working for me as a manager and we’re like Holy shit, other people are going to need this. That was generation one, one third gen three right now. I mean I think one thing to understand is that no, I’m not going to sit here and tell you we’ve never had a problem, but we’ve never had a sensor that for some reason broke or whatever that happens.

David Krauss:                     23:14                     We’re a technology company. What we do stand behind is our service. So we answered the phone, we replace any problems you can ask people. We go above and beyond at every opportunity. And I’ve instilled that in the team and the culture of the business because I wouldn’t stand for it any other way. And again, I’m, you know, I’m a customer not, not only a customer as well in terms of you know, credibility, like frankly we’re actually a pretty old at four years old in this space. Just hilarious. But I think it says a lot that booking.com shows NoiseAware as their partner in North America. Let’s just put it this way, there’ll be a lot more news and a lot more things happening with booking.com and other companies all goes to plan and you know, the idea that we have to justify or kind of defend ourselves, I’m just hoping it will probably always will as a company. Okay. On some levels. Like I really would encourage people to ask other folks who’ve used noise aware if you have any questions or you want biased opinion. I mean, some of the earliest customers we have were Saunder lyric Joe Romeo, Oh, we gonna stay Alfred Casa Neato by Airbnb. Like there’s just a lot of companies out there that have chosen us and have standardized our product in every single one of their units for a reason.

Julian Sage:                         24:38                     Now going back to to booking.com taking you guys on as a partner was there’s like some type of like serious vetting process that had to be established before they take you on and kind of, if you wouldn’t mind talking about the deal that kind of unfolded with that partnership.

David Krauss:                     24:53                     Yeah, let me, let me think about that because it’s actually really exciting. So booking.com you know, depending on who you ask or what day of the week it is, has as many listings if not more than Airbnb. So I understand it’s a, their headquarters is in Amsterdam, so they’re, they’re not based in the U S but they do have an increasing presence in, you’re in the U S not really experienced that much. I can only say you’ll probably just see them more and more as you go as like Airbnb booking comes here and that sort of stuff. But booking has, you know, a real commitments. There’s something called sustainable tourism. And just the trust and safety of this industry. We all know and we’d be foolish not to admit that there are trust and safety issues. They’re still being figured out with respect to just, you know, you’re welcoming people into a home.

David Krauss:                     25:46                     I mean hotels deal with trust, safety and fraud way more than they would care to admit as well. It’s just part of hospitality and transactions and sharing spaces. But with respect to booking.com they found us a long time ago and we just started working with them, meeting their team. They got comfortable. Of course there was a vetting process and then they said, you know, we really want to work with you guys on a joint partnership. We want to get our customers, the people who list on booking more access to noise aware because they’ve, they saw the value. Again, we checked out all the, all the things that they wanted to do so that we, we launched as partnership. So here’s the exciting part. If anybody fell asleep in the last five minutes, wake up now because this part matters the most. [inaudible] Dot com if you sign up through our landing page and I’ll make sure you have that link.

David Krauss:                     26:37                     If you sign up through our landing page and then register a unit on booking.com that had yet previously been listed on booking.com you will get a free indoor noise wear sensor. Again, I don’t know if anybody heard that but he free indoor. No, I mean is the first time we’ve done something. It is very exciting. Free indoor noise where sensor values $200 and noise aware. We’ll give you six months of free service. So is about $260 and then you just can get bookings. You get, you know, revenue from booking.com you have this tool, you’ll six months, you don’t have no obligation to continue after for whatever reason you don’t love it. And that’s where we’re at. And again, like I said, no this is, this is a dream come true for us because you know, we want partners that can help us get this tool to people who need it and even better if it costs them nothing.

David Krauss:                     27:31                     And then our partners like booking have more options for people on booking.com that are looking to book, well most importantly we’re infusing the industry in the marketplace with tools that that just help the process go better. And I’ll use this as a slight segue to talk about why the bigger picture is important here. So if you’re not familiar with the regulatory environment in this country right now around short term rentals and frankly the world, it is critically important that we as the stakeholders, the owners, the managers, the hosts in this industry take responsibility for the activity on the properties that we’re responsible for. That is not a pitch for noise aware because it’s just, there are some properties that may not, you know, noise might not be a big issue. Parking is, I mean people are like why is trash a big issue? There’s a lot of homes in the mountains where there are bears and if you don’t keep trashing doors, bears like there are a lot of issues when you, when we’re doing this and it’s, it’s early stages.

David Krauss:                     28:35                     So tools like noise where partners like booking the responsibility that we collectively, and I’m speaking as a host owner of short term rentals and a manager of short term rentals. First and foremost is where I started second as the noise guy and then third as the guy who started an advocacy organization called Brent responsibly. That is bringing more information about what are reasonable responsible expectations for people in our space. What can cities expect from us? What should we expect from cities because we should expect a lot from our cities. They should also expect you know, an element of responsibility from us and when all of those elements go well together we will end up with a beautiful future in this space or just early innings and we have to take responsibility. And I think booking.com has done that. We’re doing that and I encourage anybody who’s interested to go to rent responsibility.org if you’re interested to find out more about that and then make sure to hit up the landing page for booking.com so that we can get you noise aware of courtesy of booking.

Julian Sage:                         29:42                     Now with rent responsibly. What is kind of the, the goal with that, are you specifically trying to use the partnerships that you’ve made with some of these bigger platforms and some of these, you know, partners that you’ve been working with, the education cities and counties that have yet to change the regulations or are you trying to help the counties and cities that have already changed the regulations in order to try to allow short term rental operators to continue their business?

David Krauss:                     30:07                     Great question. And you know, Rent Responsibly is young. We’re trying to build a coalition of kind of allies and people that’s not necessarily, you know, local governments. Cause ultimately local governments want to hear from their local constituents. So we’re trying to empower the local constituents. Like you said, you’re in DC, DC has gone through a whole no rigmarole to get where they are with their ordinance and it’ll keep changing over time. So your voice will be a lot more relevant, powerful in DC than mine or Rent Responsibly. So the question becomes how do you create a scalable local advocacy organization? Meaning how do I am, how do I, and, and all the other people who are doing this. I mean, just as background, I’ve been in about 30 different city halls and in these conversations over the last couple of years because people want to know what short term rental people are doing about noise issues, for example.

David Krauss:                     31:01                     So we explain it how it works. And then normally our customers then say, you know, here’s why I do it and blah, blah, blah. It’s all about getting the local people the information they need properly advocate for themselves. That’s one fundamental element. Oh, Rent Responsibility. The other piece of it, and I’ll, I’ll I think we probably have about five to 10 more minutes. So I want wanna make sure to get these last few things in. The three legs of rent responsibly are the advocate, educate and celebrate within this industry. So advocate means how do we give you or or anybody, the ability and the information, the data, the playbook to advocate for yourself and you know, build a combined voice. Usually there’s a short term mental Alliance and again, I love doing this stuff because it’s about giving people the ability to advocate for themselves.

David Krauss:                     31:53                     That’s where it started. The next two pieces, the next two legs of the stool educate. I think there’s just a fundamental lack of education resources when people get started or when you’re trying to turn it into a professional operation or you know, just the constant flow of new products and all that stuff. So we’re trying to build just a centralized education resource where we’re bringing or getting access to existing educational resources to everybody. So it’s, it’s actually not about creating just another cow to guide. If somebody is finding 25 how to guides and they don’t know where to start, how do we get them all under one roof and put a little bit of organization there. So no matter what stage of your journey you’re on, you can probably find value. No. Hey, I need, I need to know what technology is out there. Like there should be a technology section.

David Krauss:                     32:41                     Again, this stuff is being built right now in the background, so you’re not gonna find it yet. Education’s number two. The last piece is the one I’m most excited about. Celebrate. We don’t celebrate our industry enough. We don’t and nobody does it for us. So that’s bullshit. We’re going to do that ourselves. I’ve met so many amazing entrepreneurs, amazing people, people who no got crushed by the recession, built theirs their business up by the bootstraps and now they might be facing a regulatory issue or they just, nobody has ever told their story. So I’ve engaged professional writers to take people’s stories and turn them into kind of a short form, you know, feature piece on these wonderful people. And that actually costs a little bit of money. Which is like it’s a no brainer to do. So I realize like there’s not a lot of just money sitting around to celebrate our industry.

David Krauss:                     33:34                     Well that’s why we’re figuring out a way to do it easily. And the way you any listener can contribute to that is going to rent responsibility.org sign up for it. You’ll see at advocate, educate, celebrate and you just sign up right there and then it’ll ask you two questions. I’ll ask you, why did you get started and why is this industry important to you? If you write a short paragraph right there, that information goes into our system and then we’re just finding writers to take your little snippets, contact you, directly, interview you and turn out these short pieces. So then we can start to understand who are the people of the short term rental industry. And that ends up becoming a really powerful advocacy tool. When, let’s say we wrote your story of, and then we’ve made sure that the DC council knew who you were and had a polished story of why you’re an entrepreneur trying to bring value to your community.

David Krauss:                     34:29                     That ultimately, services the advocacy engine. So those are the three elements. I know that might’ve been a little bit complicated, but the call to action is going to rent responsibly. Tell us why you got started and why you love the industry. We will try to get, you know, writers to start to celebrate these stories. We’re going to start pushing those out in the coming months. So I know that’s why I like you could tell I got worked up right there, but like this is what I care about more than anything else. And then I know we’re, again, we’re short a little short on time right now, but the last thing I want to say is to frame where we are in this moment in our industry. And nobody has a crystal ball. So the future is unwritten. The best analogy or analog to this moment for me has been the Ford model T story.

David Krauss:                     35:15                     So have you heard this story?

Julian Sage:                         35:17                     If you wouldn’t mind refreshing the listeners.

David Krauss:                     35:19                     So the Ford model T was thought to be the beginning of modern mass production cars. It was not the first automobile. 1908 Henry Ford creates a system for producing cars that makes it cheaper and more democratically available, meaning the people are building them, can actually buy them. And so it’s no longer just the rich man’s folly to drive a car. As soon as that happened, the world changed forever. It just took time for the world around automobiles to adjust and that’s where we are right now and I’ll, I’ll explain it as succinctly as I can. 1909 there were 200,000 cars in the road by 19 seven or 1916 seven years later, 2 million cars. So cause just appeared on the roads for all the rules of the road or for horses and buggies in the train cars that were going up and down.

David Krauss:                     36:11                     Kids did not have backyards. They played in the street and horses and buggies went five miles an hour. So it didn’t really matter. Cars went like 20-30 miles an hour and they didn’t know which side of the road to drive on. So just had all these real problems that people who weren’t in the car, how to deal with the car. So sometimes that’s how people feel about short term rentals. Oh I live across the street or I live near what, I just have to deal with it. I don’t think that that’s a forever problem. And so the sooner that we can evolve as an industry to start not only educating people about, you know, the rules of the road, whether it’s a traveler, a new host, you know, a veteran hosts, the city, those people need to be educated about the rules of the road and, and the city ultimately has to create the right rules of the road.

David Krauss:                     36:53                     Here’s what happened when the car was, you know, at this 2 million car moment and there was the road, 75% of the injuries were from people not in the car. Cause that’s kids, that’s, you know, innocent bystanders. That’s drunk drivers like swerving off the road. And all of those things are just the nature of the beast when you have this real disruption in society. And the sooner we can get a handle on it, create better frameworks for governments to respond appropriately, reduce the risk taxes, get collected, people you know, carry on with their lives and money stays in the community and individuals like you and I can provide hospitality and be ambassadors for the city. That’s the end game. That’s the solution we want to get to. We’re just now in this moment of generating private solutions like, like for example Noiseaware we’re solving a small, you know, relatively small problem in the big theme of things.

David Krauss:                     37:51                     But it’s a necessary problem to solve. I mean you, you’re educating people, you’ve created a podcast that is a necessary thing to do to spread the word and get and get people involved. And every host owner manager has their own evolutionary cycle. I’ll leave you with this. In 1925, I have this great graph and it’s like two lines. I create a big X and it shows that the amount of vehicle miles traveled has exponentially increased since the 1927. That’s kind of a no shit Sherlock. Statistically more miles are driven now than before. But the chances of dying in an automobile accident, it’s 90% safer now than it was in the 20s and cars are going like two and three times faster. But it’s because public policy, there’s speed limits, there’s drivers ed, there’s other auction driver’s education, so there’s speed limits, there’s drunk driving laws. Then there’s education as a driver’s ed, that’s compulsory driver’s tests, things like that. And then lastly, technology, seatbelts, airbags, antilock brakes, just safer cars. Once we get those three things right, we can reduce the risk of this industry, you know, hopefully 90% or better. And I think people will be celebrating us. We were already starting to with rent responsibly and that’s the end game.

Julian Sage:                         39:08                     That’s awesome. David! Man, you killed, you killed that advocacy speech right there. That was, that was a very well, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but, but last thing, can you tell us a little bit about what’s the future of NoiseAware? Are there any like features or products? Is it just going to be noise monitoring or do you have anything cool or some more integrations with some different software coming that we can be excited about?

David Krauss:                     39:29                     Yeah, you kind of nailed it right there at the end. So we were actively working on integrations, were integrated with Guesty right now I know a smart BMV is a big one that we’re working with. Again, we can’t put timelines on these things exactly, but I would say we’re, again, we’re very responsive. If you have questions, info@noiseaware, david@noiseaware.io. Just send a message in our chat actually in our website. If you have any questions and I’ve not answered on this podcast, definitely just go to our website, type it into the chat. Somebody will get back to you soon as I can. But specifically, you know, the software integrations is a huge push for us. As we do that, it just unlocks our ability to do more and more for people. And then no, ultimately the indoor and outdoor sensor that launched basically at the beginning of this year.

David Krauss:                     40:17                     So folks, if you have either tried noiseaware in the past just keep up with our core product as well and you’ll see that we’re rapidly improving that. Again, I’m, I’m, I hate the hard sell. Like go ask somebody else who uses noise aware. They’ll tell you how they really feel. But our product has saved so many people. Really the, the like their property. I mean it started when somebody threw a party at my place and I ended up selling that property cause the neighbor relations got so bad for a $30,000 loss. And I don’t want to see that ever happen to anybody, not the least of which is my neighbors who had just put up with a weekend of like nightmare. At the end of the day we’re building a product that I think everybody should at least take a look at at time when it’s right for you, you know, let us know and we’d be happy to take care of you.

Julian Sage:                         41:04                     Definitely. Yeah. David? Yeah. I just want to thank you so much and NoiseAware or something that my partner, my a cohost from vacation rental machine, Jon Bell, he’s got like 30 properties right now and in every property right now, he has incorporated noiseaware into it. So I mean it’s tried and true. What you guys are doing is very powerful. You’re working with some big you know, with booking and I’m sure there’s a lot more companies that you’re going to be working with, you know, really supporting the legitimacy and what you’re doing with rent responsibly. The the education. I that that is so cool. I’ll include everything in the show notes, ways to reach out to. You can also go to a, the listeners, I highly recommend if you are planning on scaling and going onto booking, definitely use that landing page. I’ll also include a link to a noiseaware in the resource page on short term Sage. All the resources in the companies that we use, we include on the resource page as well. But thank you so much David. Until next time. Host nation. Keep on hosting.

Julian Sage:                         42:02                     Hope you hosts benefited from the show. If you found value, please go on over to iTunes. Leave us a review and let us know what you enjoy about the show. If you’d like to talk to hosts that have been featured in these episodes as well as the community, go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation. Talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.